Case Studies
Case Study 
iPhone Hotel Booking Application
Q3 develops a native application for a worldwide hotel chain to provide booking functionality on the iPhone.
Q3's global sourcing model gives the maximum benefit to customers in terms of cost savings, improved quality, access to highly talented professionals, flexibility of operations and reduced time to market.
Company Profile
The Client is one of the largest family of hotel websites in the world, offering users the fastest way to find and book a hotel. The company has a multi- lingual staff and aims to offer individual and corporate travelers interesting, fast and informative web pages about lodging and transportation in cities around the world to help them plan their travels. The company operates through a directory of hotel websites all over the world that contains a chain of hotel websites that are linked to their website.
Business Situation
The Client wanted to implement the features of their hotel booking website on the iPhone using a native application.
Challenges
The challenges were:
- Engaging and intuitive user interface.
- Implement searching of hotel based on current user location using location based services.
- Provide a map view functionality on the iPhone.
- Unified login between existing web site and new iPhone application.
- Provide the functionality of making a call to customer care.
Technical Solution
Q3 came up with a dedicated team of developers and QA experts to build a solution based on Client's requirements. The team analyzed the requirements and designed the application to ensure that all needs and objectives were covered.
Some features of the iPhone application are as follows:
- The application is built with a highly engaging user interface that was extremely easy and intuitive for users.
- A user can search for hotels, view details, compare pricing, book and modify their reservations.
- The application also allows searching for hotels based on the user's geographical location using location based services.
- The hotels searched by the user are visible as a list as well as on a Google map, a feature which was implemented using the iPhone mapping APIs.
- A unified login has been implemented that allows users to share their account information between the booking web site and iPhone. This enables users to immediately start using the application to make reservations, without registering, if they already have an account from the web site.
- The application provides functionality to enable a user to make a call to customer care by launching the iPhone calling application with the appropriate phone number.
The QA team also got involved from the very beginning to ensure that bug free software as per desired quality is provided in a timely way that includes all the Client requirements.
- Objective C
- X Code 3.0
- iPhone SDK 3.0
- Interface Builder
- JSON
- MKMap Kit
- iPhone Map APIs with GPS
- iPhone OS version 3.0
Customer Speaks
In this difficult economic environment, Symfo decided to outsource one of its most critical developments to Q3 Tech. We were definitely reluctant doing so at the beginning of the project. But rapidly we understood that Q3 had the necessary skills and professionalism to bring the project to a successful realization. It was not always easy primarily because of the differences of culture. However once we understood each other, things went much better. We also understood that such a difficult project needed intense communications between Q3 and our company. Our company works on two time zones (Europe and East Coast North America) and we were amazed by the availability of the Project Manager and his team. It really contributed improving communications between us. Phase I of our product is now ready and we are quite happy with it. We are definitely ready to start Phase II with Q3 and we highly recommend them.
CEO, Symfo SA, Belgium.